Conclusion: Humanistic Study in a Time of Nightmare Economics

Abstract

I’m sure that somewhere right now someone is penning a study which will revolutionize, say, the field of Henry James studies. This is well and good, but in an era of such deep gathering political economic crisis, as the world drifts farther and farther into a new status quo in which the elect enjoy hitherto unimagined forms of opulence while more and more millions of people struggle to meet their basic material subsistence needs and participatory democracy fades into the realm of dim memory, scholars in the humanities need to engage in some concerted vocational soul searching. While I could never agree with any abrogation of the rights of colleagues to pursue what they take to be a path of apolitical scholarly disinterest, for myself, I find that I can’t turn as a scholar from this epochal crisis and live — to repurpose a line from Derek Walcott.